“Dogged does it” ought to be added to “Dieu et mon droit” and other devices of England.  On a day when I was lunching with Mr. Lloyd George in the dining-room at 10 Downing Street that looks out over the Horse Guards’ Parade, the present premier, with a characteristic gesture, flung out his hand toward the portrait of a young man in the panel over the mantel.  It was of the younger Pitt, who had taken his meals and drunk his port in this very room in that other great war a hundred years ago.  The news of Austerlitz, brought to him during his illness, is said to have killed him.  But England, undismayed, fought on for a decade, and won.  Mr. Lloyd George, in spite of burdens even heavier than Pitt’s, happily retains his health; and his is the indomitable spirit characteristic of the new Britain as well as of the old.  For it is a new Britain one sees.  Mr. Lloyd George is prime minister of a transformed Britain, a Britain modernized and democratized.  Like the Englishman who, when he first witnessed a performance of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” cried out, “How very unlike the home life of our dear Queen!” the American who lunches in Downing Street is inclined to exclaim:  “How different from Lord North and Palmerston!” We have, I fear, been too long accustomed to interpret Britain in terms of these two ministers and of what they represented to us of the rule of a George the Third or of an inimical aristocracy.  Three out of the five men who form the war cabinet of an empire are of what would once have been termed an “humble origin.”  One was, if I am not mistaken, born in Nova Scotia.  General Smuts, unofficially associated with this council, not many years ago was in arms against Britain in South Africa, and the prime minister himself is the son of a Welsh tailor.  A situation that should mollify the most exacting and implacable of our anti-British democrats!

I listened to many speeches and explanations of the prejudice that existed in the mind of the dyed-in-the-wool American against England, and the reason most frequently given was the “school-book” reason; our histories kept the feeling alive.  Now; there is no doubt that the histories out of which we were taught made what psychologists would call “action patterns,” or “complexes,” in our brains, just as the school-books have made similar complexes in the brains of German children and prepared them for this war.  But, after all, there was a certain animus behind the histories.  Boiled down, the sentiment was one against the rule of a hereditary aristocracy, and our forefathers had it long before the separation took place.  The Middle-Western farmer has no prejudice against France, because France is a republic.  The French are lovable, and worthy of all the sympathy and affection we can give them.  But Britain is still nominally a monarchy; and our patriot thinks of its people very much as the cowboy used to regard citizens of New York.  They all lived on Fifth Avenue.  For the cowboy, the residents of the dreary side streets simply did not exist.  We have been wont to think of all the British as aristocrats, while they have returned the compliment by visualizing all Americans as plutocrats—­despite the fact that one-tenth of our population is said to own nine-tenths of all our wealth!